3 Best Ways to Promote a Facebook Group in B2B Sector

Your own engaged Facebook group can become an invaluable asset for your business. This is the best CRM tool to build a tribe around your brand. You can listen, network, nurture and convert your social leads, all in one place that you control.

Posts published in an active group reach most of its members, around 80% of the audience will see them in their feeds while fan page posts are shown to only 3% of fans on average if you’re not paying for ads.

How do you grow a Facebook group on steroids? If you’ve been seeking help with this challenge, you’ve been coming across the same few guides on digital marketing blogs all the time that basically boil down to these 3 options:

Invite your existing friends to join it (they are unlikely to be relevant to your biz) or make new relevant friends to invite later (slow)

Advertise it to your existing audience – on your blog, to your email list and social media following (you’re unlikely to get a lot of members fast and you may not even have it yet)

Run paid ads just explaining to your potential members why your group is great (and drain your budget)

These strategies won’t get you far.

Try the ideas below instead.

• Cold email outreach to your prospects

Email your prospects something like this:

Hey [name],

I’m [your name] from [your company] and I’ve created a [your client’s niche] community on Facebook for [your client’s niche] experts and people who need [help, ex: help with their online business].

I like your videos on YouTube and for this reason I’d be honored to have you in the marketing team.

[your group name] is completely free and it will be a good way for you to reach [your client’s clients, ex: consulting clients] and get more exposure.

You can join and participate whenever you want.

There’s no obligation to be consistently active in it.

If you’re interested – here’s the page to join:

[Your Facebook group page url]

If you instead have any questions – feel free to ask

Cheers

[your name]

[your title] at [your company website]

(very, very rough example)

• Lock and host a lead magnet inside your Facebook group

Your group members are actually your social leads, except for your existing clients who you’re not planning to upsell anything else to.

Getting new members to your group is lead generation and it can be done the exact same way you’re building your email list. You need a landing page and a lead magnet.

If you’re converting cold traffic, your new members will be information qualified leads. If you’re converting your existing email subscribers – then marketing qualified leads and above, depending on relationships you have with them and how you score them.

Your landing page may either be your Facebook group page or any external landing page.

For example, you might wanna use a survey landing page built with Typeform to get join applications and pre-approve new members (this way you’re qualifying your social leads).

Create a mind-blowing value-packed lead magnet, publish it as a post in your Facebook group and pin it to the top for all members to see it.

Facebook allows you to host a lead magnet as a video or document. You can also create a document without leaving the platform, just click “Create Doc”:

Don’t use a very simple content upgrade type of lead magnet that you can churn out in 10 minutes (cheat sheets, checklists, resource lists, etc…). No one will join for the sake of this little thing. Put serious hard work in it. A powerful mini course would do great but please no boring theoretical stuff or bombastic fluff, you will lose members

Next, fill your group with more posts:

Conversation starters

Useful infographics, videos, docs, etc…

Share your growth hacks or life hacks

Again, don’t post links and don’t allow your members to do so.

You don’t want your community to become a dead link farm.

Resist the itching desire to drop your blog post URL, squeeze page URL, YouTube video, etc. If you wanna share it with your tribe of social leads – copy and paste your article or PDF report into a Facebook post but remove any links from within your piece of content.

Now build a small crowd of first members before the big game (optional but strongly recommended). Invite your sales team, other employees, existing customers, business partners or someone in your niche who know you to join and interact in there.

If you still have no one to invite – make at least a few new connections and grow a tiny email list first. Once you notice some good consistent engagement even with 20 active members – promote the heck out of your group just like you would promote a normal lead magnet sending traffic to a landing page.

There are a plenty of excellent free and paid tutorials online teaching you viable strategies and tactics to do it.

• Use a Contest Tool

Contests is one of the top solutions for generating social leads. Growing a Facebook group from scratch with a contest creation software like VYPER is a no brainer.

It has a special feature to reward contestants for joining it. Here is what they see on their contest dashboard after signing up for your giveaway:

Reward them for inviting their relevant friends to your community too giving the most entries or even a freebie instead. Set them a task to invite their friends until they refer 10 new members in order to grab the coolest prize.

To keep newcomers in the group, make sure there’s a mini course and engaging useful posts inside.

Important! No matter how perfect your community is, many members will leave it very soon because you will attract freebie seekers who don’t care about anything but your rewards. Some of them may remain in the group and never write a single word.

Fret not, it’s a common problem with incentivized traffic. Plus, there will be a bunch of spammers and idiots.

A lot of moderation required.

Don’t be upset losing and removing tons of members. You should still end up with a large audience of good people after all and getting rid of bad social leads is a must.

Note: the better ad targeting done – the less junk members acquired, it also depends on the quality of your traffic sources.

Self-employed lead generation manager, virtual assistant from Kyiv, Ukraine helping B2B startups improve and implement their lead generation strategies and tactics increasing the quantity and quality of sales leads in their pipelines.